1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile ad-hoc network. More particularly, the present invention relates to a routing method and system for a mobile ad-hoc network that efficiently routes a packet by quickly updating topology information shared by nodes adaptively to variation of the network topology while minimizing generation of redundant traffic.
2. Description of the Related Art
In dynamic networks such as wireless ad-hoc network, each node acts as a mobile router and is free to move about arbitrarily. The reason that such movement is permissible is that information transmitted on networks having a topology such as the wireless ad-hoc network permits the nodes outside the wireless transmission range of each to be capable of communicating with each other via multiple hops.
In such networks, the network topology dynamically changes as each mobile node moves, whereby the mobile nodes should update their network topology information adaptively to the change of the network topology for effective communication between source and destination nodes by the network having the most current routing information.
In order to manage the routing information, two kinds of signaling are used. One type of signal is broadcasted periodically in order to check for the existence of a link. The second type of signal is an informational signal transmitted to inform of an event such as a change of route. The periodic signaling is inevitable for maintaining the routing scheme such that it cannot be omitted from the ad-hoc network.
Accordingly, the above-mentioned signaling impacts the capacity of the network and reduces the overall efficiency as there is a significant amount of signaling just to check for links and report events. Accordingly, an increase in the signaling efficiency of communication between the nodes and the network itself can be increased by a reduction in the amount of traffic caused by the arbitrary event-driven signaling (i.e., traffic overhead).
Such traffic redundancy is determined according to how frequently the events occur and propagation ranges of the event-driven signals. In the conventional mobile routing schemes, even when a link is changed, the link change information is propagated over the entire network, resulting in traffic redundancy. Such traffic redundancy reduces the network throughput, resulting in instabilities of communication services.
Accordingly, there has been a need for developing a mobile routing method that is capable of minimizing signaling traffic while enabling each node to quickly update information required for recovering a route.